Thursday, November 01, 2012

We know the story, which is the story of why the story
always shatters, never self-organizes, never closes on itself, never is the
story. Marcel, an anxious child, can only truly calm his pacing heart and
asthmatic and insomniac spasms by being kissed by Mama before bedtime. Of
course, the real milk and honey would be Mama spending the whole night on a cot
besides him as he sleeps. But the fly in the milk and honey is Papa, who
operates as a ‘suppressor’, or so the Scientologists say (knowledge I have
garnered from the tres disappointing sketch of Tom Cruise in last month’s
Vanity Fair), and frowns at the codlings. Last night, advocating for the wee
little pea to remain on his little foam wee little pea ship, instead of being
borne by A. as we watched the first episode of Homeland that we had just
downloaded, I had a flash of sympathy for Marcel’s pa. Surely he was thinking
that Marcel would be much better off if he didn’t get milk and honey every
time. And maybe Marcel would have toughened up – maybe, if his father had
prevailed, he would have grown up to introduce the noir detective into France,
writing sentences like: ‘And then I hit him with the butt end of the pistol. He
seemed to want to protest, but with the scarf stuffed in his mouth, his words
weren’t too clear to me.” --- instead of, well, choose your own favorite oceanic
outpouring.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

When I was in elementary school, I liked tests. There I was,
a little ace, with my little Guiness Book of Records, my Funk n Wagnels
Encyclopedia, the entertaining smart boy on the street. In High School, I
stopped liking tests – partly cause I no longer aced them. In fact, I sank to
the norm or below. And perhaps because I was no longer so good at them, I took
a more level view of them. The longer I looked, the more it seemed to me that
tests had to be on their way out in the age of nuclear power and space flight.
They were so primitive. They were as bad an instrument for measuring learning
as a spoon is for eating spaghetti. What you learned, what you know, is
imbricated with what others know –it is social to the very core. And yet, the
test was individuated and individuating from the get go. The only people who
really understood this fact about learning, it seemed to me, were the cheaters –
who, at least, exchanged answers with each other. But of course cheating is
ultimately parasitic upon testing. No, I felt, tests had to go.

Later on I began to think that the problem was that tests
had been displaced from the plane of experience to the plane of cognition. In
experience, the test is essential. The self must be put, or must put itself, in
a thousand alien circumstances in order to know itself – in order to unfold
itself. Ultimately, the self has a plastic, flexible capability, an imaginative
potential, that comes out when it is really tested. Unfortunately, the rule of
cognitive tests has made it harder and harder to afford experiential ones. In
the richest society in history, the U.S., it is now imperative to cut short the
Wanderjahre and find a job with insurance, so that you can pay back the student
loan. Life has been visibly diminished.

In France, which is as exam-ocentric as ancient China, the
test form is everywhere – especially in childrearing. Our little nouveau-ne,
Adam, had to pass his numbers – on weight – before we could leave the hospital,
and the sage femme that visits us has said rather menacing things whenever we
told her that Adam didn’t seem to be eating as much as he should. Poor tyke is
a finicky eater, like his Pa. So yesterday, when Antonia took him to the clinic
and it turned out that he had been secretly gaining weight – indeed, he passed
the weight test 30 grams to spare!- we wept with joy. At the same time, it felt
like already we aretracking him on the
path that leads to the “bac” – and he hasn’t even gotten the visual apparatus
in order, yet! Meanwhile, from the States, all I hear is parents complaining
that their kids are underperforming the tests, which means that they won’t make
the grade for the scholarships, which means that they will have to go to
community college and then be stuck in some hamburger-flipping job at Mickey
Dees the rest of their life.

The test regime is now a brainless monster, with tentacles
in every heart. Yet, surely Rousseau was right in Emile – good childrearing is
about using your hands, imagining, dawdling over the immediate data of nature
(if you can find it).

Sunday, October 28, 2012

As every alert parent knows, there are two essential child
rearing books – Doctor Spock, in the most revised edition, and Gilles Deleuze’s
Logique du Sens. Jonie Mitchell’s lines come to mind: “papa gave me the sugar/
momma showed me the deeper meaning.” Such is the case here. We use Spock to
gain ersatz certainty in response to various problems that pop up in the
schedule of duties (eat sleep poop radiate an adorable aura that touches every
heavenly orb) that have been impose on baby – and we use Deleuze to understand
why, after a lifetime of ironies and distancing techniques, we find ourselves
spontaneously cooing chou chou and petit lapin to our bundle of joy. It is a
world of diminutives, a real microverse, and we are just realizing the extent
of our contract with Wonderland – which is where the L.d.S comes in to describe
its extent and limits.The Logique was presided over by the spirit of Lewis
Carroll, while Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus is governed by the harsher
spirit of Artaud. Lewis Carroll gives us the sugar, Deleuze notes, while Artaud
gives us the deeper meaning. In his asylum in Rodez, Artaud tried to translate
Jabberwocky – and in that moment emerged something that was less a crossroads
than a car crash. For though Carroll’s made up language and Artaud’s schizo
talk, which had infected his poems since the breakdown of 1938, might seem
similar, in fact they repulsed each other.

Artaud intensely disliked Jabberwocky. Deleuze explains why –
and in so doing the Deleuze reader gets a sense of the fact that the malentendu between Artaud and Carroll
stnds at the center of Deleuze’s philosophy. Deleuze quotes Artaud’s letter
about Jabberwocky, which for me, now, defines the difference between parenthood
and the perpetual bachelorhood of philosophy:

“I don’t like either the languages of the surface, exuding
happy leisure time and intellectual successes; the former rests on the anus,
but without putting in the soul or the heart. The anus is always terror.”

The anus in the microverse of the diminutives is less terror
than clockwork, a mechanism for measuring the new born’s absorption of milk, as
well as a mess you clean up without really thinking too much about it after a
while. You don’t change diapers in fear and trembling.

Myself, I’ve long been on the fear and trembling side, and
now I’m on the other. It is a relief to change diapers for once. And it makes
the petit lapin happy, too!

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.